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                          Sepulchre

Oh blessed body!  Whither art thou thrown?
No lodging for thee, but a cold hard stone?
So many hearts on earth, and yet not one
                                      Receive thee?

Sure there is room within our hearts good store;
For they can lodge transgressions by the score:
Thousands of toys dwell there, yet out of door
                                      They leave thee.

But that which shows them large, shows them unfit.
Whatever sin did this pure rock commit,
Which holds thee now?   Who hath indicted it
                                      Of murder?

Where our hard hearts have took up stones to brain thee,
And missing this, most falsely did arraign thee;
Only these stones in quiet entertain thee,
                                      And order.

And as of old, the law by heav’nly art,
Was writ in stone;  so thou, which also art
The letter of the word, find’st no fit heart
                                      To hold thee.

Yet do we still persist as we began,
And so should perish, but that nothing can,
Though it be cold, hard, foul, from loving man
                                      Withhold thee.

Holy Saturday has nothing of Good Friday's long, anguished narrative soaked in sorrow, suffering and sadness. Holy Saturday knows nothing of Sunday morning's dawning of a new day, and with it a new creation, because the sun has risen, and the Son has risen.

Holy Saturday is a hiatus, almost as if history has come to a juddering halt, unable to move on beyond the chasm that has split the universe, and time itself. All being holds its breath during an interval where nothing is happening because the worst has happened; the One "without whom nothing that exists was made", is himself dead.

Herbert's treatment of Jesus' in the tomb is entirely based on the metaphor of stone; the cold hard stone on which Christ lay and which in its enormity sealed the tomb closed to keep his body in; and the cold hard human heart which has no space even for the body of Christ, and is sealed even more tightly to keep the Saviour out. The metaphor is heightened by the verb "thrown", which is taking a liberty with the Gospel text in which Jesus body is treated with tenderness and care, wrapped with loving hands and laid in the tomb.  

But the fate of Jesus in human hands remains for Herbert the story of the one who had nowhere to lay his head, who was born outside because there was no room at the inn, and who was "despised and rejected by men, a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief." For Herbert that grief is deepened immeasurably by human indifference to the love of the one crucified for sins. The second and third stanzas compare human hearts with enough accommodation for any amount of sins, but none for Jesus, and the hard, newly hewn rock tomb which gives Jesus rest.

Mid-ministry Jesus was nearly stoned for what he taught, and now it is stone, not any human heart, that gives him the hospitality of space. The image changes again to the law written on stone, and God's great purpose to inscribe his law on human hearts; but there is no heart available or receptive enough to absorb the ink of God's love letter. 

The last stanza begins with the likeliehood that Christ's death has been in vain. As he lies in the tomb, throughout the long hours of Good Friday evening, the whole day of Saturday, and into the early hours of Sunday, Jesus is between a rock and a hard place. If human hearts stay closed, hard, sealed from the inside, what then of the one who died for the sins of the world? 

The human heart which gives lodging to morally foul and spiritually fatal sins, is no fit place for the one who bore and "taketh away the sins of the world". So having rejected the Saviour each human heart becomes its own sepulchre, a place of perishing. Except. "But that nothing can, though it be cold, hard foul, from loving man withhold thee."

This is Romans 8.38: "nothing in all creation can separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord." Even the best intentioned Christian heart gives living space to sin, forgets the love that died to take away sin, is at times impervious to the law of love God would write on the heart. The miracle of Holy Saturday is this; the sepulchre in which Jesus lay does not entomb the love of God, still less can human hearts defeat a love that is eternal in duration and determined in redemptive purpose.

'The Sacrifice' is Herbert's longest poem. (See below at the end of this post for a link to the full text of the poem)

The Sacrifice is the only poem in The Temple in which Christ is the speaker. The reader or hearer is directly addressed by Christ, who tells his story as the unfolding drama of redemption from the perspective of the Crucified.

The utter self-giving that is the sacrifice of the cross is narrated, described and impressed on the reader, by a relentless tone of grief internalised in the heart of the Saviour whose heartbeat thuds in the rhythms of sixty three stanzas in iambic pentameter. The effect is cumulative, " with five short-longs or light-heavies to every line. This Latin metre gives his monologue a solemn and insistent monotony like a tolling bell, rounded off by the three iambics of the refrain." (Drury, 8) 

The voice of Christ is profoundly ironic throughout. The unthinkable has to be thought, the impossible is taking place, the one who is human suffers beyond the scale of human experience and the one who is divine dies. The insistent use of the first person singular is inescapable; the refrain reminds the reader that unspeakable anguish, inconsolable sorrow, infinite suffering and eternal loss are fully owned by the God who in Christ is reconciling the world to himself.

"Was ever grief like mine?" is a rhetorical question intended to jolt the reader into awareness. This grief and suffering has no legal, moral or judicial justification. It is planned and inflicted by human structures, institutions and spiritual wickedness in high places as all the political, religious and legal powers are unleashed. The Passion of Jesus is the ultimate human rebellion against God, the crucifying of love, the rejection of the hands of reconciliation by nailing them down, once and for all.

Only twice in sixty three verses does that refrain change,"Was ever grief like mine?" Throughout it expects the answer No. When it comes to the cry of dereliction in stanza 54, the change brings the poem to a stuttering failure of rhythm, as the whole universe faces the existential threat of God's all but unbearable anguish at human sin, and God suffers God-forsakenness as "Being begins to die":

But, O my God, my God! why leav’st thou me,
The sonne, in whom thou dost delight to be?
My God, my God ——
                           Never was grief like mine.

The poem falters, and only picks up again when Christ answers his own question, "Never was grief like mine." The answer to the question asked throughout the poem, is answered by the one who has relentlessly asked it, and the answer is torn from a soul tormented beyond human comprehension, and, perhaps, beyond even divine articulation.

The only other time the refrain is changed is the last verse. The long winding road is almost ended; from Gethsemane to Caiaphas, from Pilate to the via dolorosa, from the Cyrenian's help to the soldiers' nails and dice and sour wine, from crucifixion to abandonment and anguished speech. And now the final word:

But now I die; now all is finished.
My wo, mans weal: and now I bow my head.
Onely let others say, when I am dead,
                            Never was grief like mine.

Herbert's long poem is like a slowly unfolding commentary on the stations of the cross. I have long thought that on Good Friday, it could be performed in its entirety, read in the tones of lamentation. (See below for a link to the full text of the poem).Of course, the refrain comes from Lamentations 1.12: ^"Is it nothing to you, all ye that pass by? behold, and see if there be any sorrow like unto my sorrow, which is done unto me, wherewith the Lord hath afflicted me in the day of his fierce anger."

Herbert echoes the heartbroken sense of futility, wasted suffering, human desolation and bewildered anguish of those sitting in Jerusalem devastated, stripped of life, disfigured beyond recognition. And the tragedy is deepened beyond belief by the fact that there are those who pass by unmoved, who live their own lives as if all this had not happened, or who are too busy with their own priorities to even notice the Crucified God. 

If you take the time to read Herbert's version of the Passion, put into the mouth of the suffering Christ, you will begin to feel the cumulative power of the question asked of every bystander, and which stands as the opening of this great poem:

Oh all ye, who passe by, whose eyes and minde
To worldly things are sharp, but to me blinde;
To me, who took eyes that I might you finde:
                                 Was ever grief like mine?

(The image is a studio study of one of the Stations of the Cross, by my friend, Alexander Stoddart. This and two others in my study, form a triptych of the Crucifixion.)

(You can find the full text of The Sacrifice here)

               

                   Judgement

Almighty Judge, how shall poor wretches brook
                          Thy dreadful look,
Able a heart of iron to appal,
                          When thou shalt call
For ev'ry man's peculiar book?

What others mean to do, I know not well;
                         Yet I hear tell,
That some will turn thee to some leaves therein
                         So void of sin,
That they in merit shall excel.

But I resolve, when thou shalt call for mine,
                        That to decline,
And thrust a Testament into thy hand:
                        Let that be scanned.
There thou shalt find my faults are thine.

In three rapid fire stanzas Herbert dares to imagine his survival of a face to face encounter with the Almighty judge. Acknowledging up front in the poem, that each person is a poor wretch who has no defences against the dreadful look and apalling scrutiny, he knows there is no escape from the final reckoning. 

"Ev'ry man's peculiar book' is a familiar metaphor for the story of a human life. Deeds and words, thoughts and motives, achievements and failures, all the twisted turnings of relationships, chosen paths and culpable evasions, all are recorded as evidence of how a life has been lived. Each person has their own peculiar, particular, unique and personally written story.

But what to do? There are shameful sins and chosen wrongs, evil inclinations and toxic thoughts, persistence in known wrong and evasions of responsibility for what we ought to have owned as our fault, our true and deliberate fault. By this time Herbert should be terrified, but instead he takes time to speculate about how others will survive God's judgement. 

The middle stanza is a 17th Century Protestant critique of the Catholic doctrine of merit. Here and there in the book are pages of moral and spiritual achievement, whole days when no sin is recorded. These are evidence of good intent, of genuine effort, that the heart is in the right place. Herbert's criticism is in the irony "so void of sin that they in merit shall excel." In this verse the Reformation cry, "not of works lest any man should boast" is made doubly effective by its mere statement without explicitly argued contradiction.

Instead Herbert tells of his own intended strategy. The last verse is either irreverent presumption or it is blessed assurance. Indeed, in Calvinist theology one of the greatest spiritual dilemmas is the basis of assurance. What it is that gives certainty of faith to the Christian soul that on the day of judgement, they will survive the all seeing scrutiny of Almighty God. 

Herbert is so assured of acquittal and acceptance that he will "thrust" a Testament into God's hand, like a good defence lawyer throwing incontrovertible evidence of innocence on the table of the court for the Judge to read. Actually, in full flow now, Herbert even tells the Judge what to do – "Let that be scanned." Test it, weigh it, receive it as final proof – of what? Not of Herbert's innocence, but of something else.

"There thou shalt find my faults are thine." We are thrust into the mystery of sin and forgiveness, of guilt and righteousness, and the Testament has much to say about that in the court of God's judgement. "God made him who had no sin to be sin for us, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God." (2 Cor 5.21)  Herbert is with Paul when it comes to assurance on the day of Judgement: "That I may gain Christ and be found in him, not having a righteousness of my own that comes from the law, but that which is through faith in Christ—the righteousness that comes from God on the basis of faith." (Phil. 3.8-9)

There is something outrageous about the curt "my sins are thine." In four words Herbert condenses an entire atonement theology of substitution, the righteous dying for the unrighteous, the life given a ransom for many, being redeemed by the precious blood of Christ. The line between fully embraced forgiveness and assurance, and complacent contentment that all shall be well, is sometimes finely drawn. "There thou shalt find my sins are thine" comes close to crossing it, in its triumphant thrusting in God's face, the evidence of God's sacrificial love in the gift and death of his Son, for the world's sin, Herbert's sins, and ours.   

The Pulley

       When God at first made man,                                                                                                  Having a glass of blessings standing by,
Let us, said He, pour on him all we can.
Let the world's riches, which dispersed lie,
      Contract into a span.

      So strength first made a way,
Then beauty flowed, then wisdom, honour, pleasure
When almost all was out, God made a stay,
Perceiving that alone of all His treasure
      Rest in the bottom lay.

      For if I should, said He,
Bestow this jewel also on my creature,
He would adore my gifts instead of me,
And rest in nature, not the God of nature;
      So both should losers be.

      Yet let him keep the rest,
But keep them with repining restlessness,
Let him be rich and weary, that at least,
If goodness lead him not, yet weariness
      May toss him to my breast.

In Scotland the pulley was a long clothes drying frame that once full was pulled above head height in the scullery. That, at least was my experience as a child. Herbert, however, would have in mind any wheel with a rope attached which was used to lift heavy objects by pulling down on the other side. You pulled on the pulley to pull something heavy upwards. The title already suggests that God's human creature was going to be hard work!

"When God first made man…" Immediately we are in Genesis, looking over God's shoulder as he forms and fashions human beings. We are also told of what's going on in the mind of God. And what's going on is the inner discussion of the Godhead about how to maximise blessings for humanity.Like the later promise of Malachi, (3.10) God will open the windows (glasse) of heaven and pour out such blessings as the human heart won't contain them. The entire beneficence of creation concentrated on human flourishing and joy.

The second stanza shows God hesitating, itself a theological novelty. All that is needed for human flourishing, the highest ideal of physical, social and moral life are poured out, until God had second thoughts. With all this joy, pleasure, fulfilment, and contentment, what motive would be left for human creatures to give God a second thought.

If God bestows the final gift of rest then "he would adore my gifts instead of me." Herbert is one of the finest expositors of love as the union of God and his human creatures. He understands exactly the tensions that are set up by passionate and longing love. The lover loves the beloved because only in that love can they find personal fulfilment. But pushed too far, the joy of satisfaction can become an end in itself, and we love the other not for themselves but for what they can give us. 

Love stays alive and goes on growing only when there is a sense of incompleteness, more to learn of each other, desires never permanently fulfilled, questions that are never fully answered about the mystery and the unexplored inner world of this other person, that which always surprises us, and all of this contracted into the span of a human heart that is made for restlessness, discontent and longing. Perfection of human life and love would be what P T Forsyth once called "a finished futility." It is aspiration, longing, desire, discontent, that keeps us restless.

"Thou hast made us for thyself, and our hearts are restless until they rest in thee." (Augustine, Confessions.) Surely Herbert knew those words, because the last stanza is the same argument in poetic form and with God as the speaker. "Repining restlessness" is precisely unfulfilled longing, conscious incompleteness, desire satisfied but never permanently. The search is long and tiring, fulfilling but frustratingly temporary, like those hill climbs when having reached what we think is the summit, we find there's still a ways to go. So we are pulled onwards, and upwards.

No surprise this is one of Herbert's best known poems. God's love is wise, knowing that love must always be a mutual longing, a seeking and finding, an encounter of two freely given hearts that will always be precarious, requiring to be worked at, and dependent not only on mutual attraction but on an endless restlessness that pulls the one to the other.

Of course, Herbert knew full well that human restlessness is the inevitable pull of the finite towards infinitude, of the unfulfilled towards the One in whom we live and move and have our being, and in whom, finally, we will rest.    

(Photo by my friend Graeme Clark)   

           

The Holdfast.

I threatened to observe the strict decree
            Of my deare God with all my power & might.
            But I was told by one, it could not be;
Yet I might trust in God to be my light.

Then will I trust, said I, in him alone.
            Nay, ev’n to trust in him, was also his:
            We must confesse that nothing is our own.
Then I confesse that he my succour is:

But to have nought is ours, not to confesse
            That we have nought. I stood amaz’d at this,
            Much troubled, till I heard a friend expresse,
That all things were more ours by being his.
            What Adam had, and forfeited for all,
            Christ keepeth now, who cannot fail or fall.

One of the best interpreters of Herbert's poems helps us get at the heart of what this poem is about: "every grace is the gift of God, even the grace to acknowledge our gracelessness." (Joseph Summers, George Herbert, His Religion and Art, 194).

Herbert is on the familiar territory of comparing his own inadequacy with Christ's sufficiency, setting his own unworthiness against the value put on every human soul by the crucifixion. The final index of human worth and value to God is Calvary; he knows that in his head, but in the daily grind of an incomplete obedience finds it hard to feel and know it in his heart.

The delicate mechanism of Herbert's soul swung between self-condemnation and assurance of forgiveness. Many of his poems explore and describe what that feels like, and move by various paths to some form of resolution. What he sought was the settled assurance of the later hymn writer Thomas Kelly, "Inscribed upon the cross we see, / in shining letters, God is love!" What gives many of the poems in The Temple their enduring spiritual truthfulness is precisely those acknowledged oscillations of faith and hope and love that are part of the earth-bound condition of a humanity that trusts that, nevertheless, in Christ, it is heaven bound.

The first stanza is a blunt acknowledgement that he tries his utmost to keep the First Commandment  with all his power and might. But he keeps being told to stop attempting the impossible. He cannot do that in his own strength. Instead he must trust the God of light, a clear pointer to Christ 'the true light that lightens every man who comes into the world."(John 1.9)

Trust, not self-confident achievement, that's what's needed. So with unabashed confidence the poet decides to decide to trust. Except. "By grace are we saved through faith, and that not of ourselves; it is the gift of God." (Ephesians 2.89) So even the capacity to trust is given by grace. Indeed the confession of faith is possible only by the movement of the Holy Spirit, convicting of sin and enabling the confession of Christ as Saviour. The poet is still determined to be the agent who makes all this happen – "Then I confess that he my succour is…"

"But to have nought is ours, not to confess that we have nought." Human decisiveness is yet another attempt to control the levers of God's saving purposes. But actually no. To have nothing to do, or give, or achieve, means precisely that. We have nothing to bargain with, nothing. And it is that surrender of initiative to God that is the way of salvation; just as the stealing of the initiative from God was the primal sin in eating the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.

At which point we are back in Eden. If we want to have all things in Christ, they are ours only as we surrender our wilfulness and life goals of making the world, and God, to conform to our desires. The will to power is incompatible with love for God, because eventually the will to power is prepared to take on even God. Salvation is not our project, it is God's purpose, God's free gift, from beginning to end. 

The entire argument about who does what in the struggle of the human heart to love God perfectly, resolves into the last few lines. The poet has been interrupted again in full flow, by a friend (Christ) who assures him that "all things are more permanently, fully and securely his by their belonging to Christ, who holds them fast. 

The final couplet describes the tragedy of humanity, fallen in Adam, and the redemption of humanity held fast by "Christ, who cannot fail or fall." Adam forfeited innocence, freedom, assurance and the hope of life eternal. In Christ, the second Adam, innocence is restored through the cross, and freedom, assurance and hope are Christ's gifts purchased by the cross and guaranteed by his resurrection, ascension and Lordship. "As in Adam all have died, so in Christ shall all be made alive…" 

O loving wisdom of our God,
  When all was sin and shame,
He, the last Adam, to the fight
  And to the rescue came.

(Photo by Graeme Clark, Iron cross at Paisley Abbey)

 

Affliction II                    

                   Kill me not ev'ry day,
Thou Lord of life, since thy one death for me
        Is more than all my deaths can be,
                    Though I in broken pay
Die over each hour of Methusalem's stay.

                    If all men's tears were let
Into one common sewer, sea, and brine;
         What were they all, compar'd to thine?
                   Wherein if they were set,
They would discolour thy most bloody sweat.

                     Thou art my grief alone,
Thou Lord conceal it not: and as thou art
         All my delight, so all my smart:
                    Thy cross took up in one,
By way of imprest, all my future moan.

 

Herbert wrote a series of five poems titled 'Affliction'. It was clearly a thing for him! It isn't a word commonly used today, perhaps because it carries a considerable freight of negativity.

For Herbert it refers to suffering in its many guises and disguises. Physical illness and pain (he suffered from tuberculosis), emotional anguish from anxiety and stress about his own mortality, and recurring guilt and a chronic sense of unworthiness, as well as those times in life when circumstances conspire to overthrow the always fragile framework of our life. 

In this poem Herbert is saying that the suffering and death of Christ, for Herbert's and a world's sin, kills him every day. That one death of the Son of God haunts his thoughts so that even if he reached Methuselah's 969 years, and died every hour of every one of those years, the balance would still be on Christ's side. Why? Because while Herbert is mortal and will die as a matter of course, Christ is eternally the Son of God and the Lord of life, and his death is the death of life.

What afflicts Herbert is the thought that Christ died for him, that the Lord of Life died on behalf of a world's sin, and Herbert like Paul the Apostle, counted himself the chief of sinners. Those who are afflicted will weep with pain, sorrow, regret and other forms of human anguish, and that universal overflow grief is never, ever, to be discounted. But still, argues Herbert, if every human tear that ever fell, was gathered into one vast reservoir of waste, even in oceans deep and wide, their cumulative evidence of sorrow in affliction would be no match for the tears of the righteous crucified Christ.

That second stanza deliberately uses an incongruous image. Human tears, even all the tears ever shed, dilute the blood of Christ, as Herbert recalls Gethsemane and the agonising of the Son of Man made visible in sweat like great drops of blood falling on the ground. (Luke 22.44) Affliction for Herbert has a double meaning; there is the affliction of the Christian, and then there is the affliction of Christ. They cannot be compared in profundity of suffering, in eternal significance, in redemptive value, or in any way that tries to equate the human with the divine. 

The last stanza plays out the paradox. The Lord of life has died for him, and Herbert has to live with the anguish of that. Yet that death has been the remaking of him; out of Christ's death comes forgiveness, new creation, reconciliation and a making of peace by the blood of the cross. So the death of Christ is grief and delight, cause for lifelong repentance and lifelong praise, a sacrifice bathed in sorrow and a gift drenched in love. 

The cross absorbs into the heart of the eternal God all the anguish of alienated humanity, and through the death of Christ for love of the world, negates the violence, hatred, and destructive powers of death. Hence those last two lines: In one almighty death, Christ has put down the advance payments (imprest) for all Herbert's, and every Christian's future reasons for complaint, moaning and contrition. The poem started with Herbert paying in instalments (broken pay); it ends with Christ settling future debts, because by his death, the debt is paid. 

AS Holy Week begins, and slowly we walk the uphill path to Calvary, Herbert is reminding us of the cost and consequence of sin, and also the delight and gratitude of the forgiven heart. 

 

                Even Song

                               Blest be the God of love,

Who gave me eyes, and light, and power this day,

                     Both to be busie, and to play.

                     But much more blest be God above,

 

                              Who gave me sight alone,

                     Which to himself he did deny:

                     For when he sees my ways, I die:

But I have got his son, and he hath none.

 

                             What have I brought thee home

For this thy love? have I discharg'd the debt,

                     Which this day's favour did beget?

                      I ran; but all I brought, was foam.

 

                             Thy diet, care, and cost

                      Do end in bubbles, balls of wind;

                      Of wind to thee whom I have crossed,

But balls of wild-fire to my troubled mind.

 

                            Yet still thou goest on,

And now with darkness closest weary eyes,

                     Saying to man, It doth suffice :

                     Henceforth repose; your work is done.

                           

                            Thus in thy Ebony box

                    Thou dost inclose us, till the day

                    Put our amendment in our way,

And give new wheels to our disorder'd clocks.

 

                           I muse, which shows more love,

The day or night: that is the gale, this th' harbour;

                   That is the walk, and this the arbour;

                   Or that the garden, this the grove.

 

                          My God, thou art all love.

                   Not one poor minute scapes thy breast,

                   But brings a favour from above;

And in this love, more then in bed, I rest.

" I will lay me down in peace and take my rest; for it is thou, Lord, only, that makest me dwell in safety." (Psalm 4.9) This in itself is a sufficient prayer of personal commitment to the faithful love of God. Evensong condensed to a one line liturgy.

But Herbert has more to say, and echoes the Book of Common Prayer with his poem about confession and thanksgiving as the balancing principles of each day's audit.

The first and last stanzas read consecutively would make a fine two verse conclusion to most days, the mind and soul settling down contented, secure and blessed, and ready to sleep. Instead there is this lengthy list of self-recriminations that threaten to turn evensong into a litany of failed devotion.

But Herbert knows what he is doing. He starts where he means to end by praying to the God of love. The next three stanzas explore his own inner world as he has journeyed through the day, and there is much to regret, and for which the God above rightly judges him. Despite the gift of the Saviour, and his own sins' part in crucifying the Christ, he is still incapable of a love that would prevent his continuing sins of omission and commission. But he does go on about it! If he isn't careful, the poet will talk himself out of sleep and rest, and stew in the juices of his own guilt, which is just another sin of self-indulgence!

Then God interrupts the flow of self-condemning verbiage: "It doth suffice:/Henceforth repose: your work is done." I can almost hear Herbert's inner reciting of I John  1 "If we confess our sins he is faithful and just to forgive us, and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness."  The sins are confessed. It doth suffice. Now get to sleep. Your work is done. It is God's work to forgive, and that too, is already done.

If God is all love then his love is constant whether day or night, in the storm or the harbour, the open meadow or enclosed garden: wherever and whenever "My God, thou art all love." The poem ends where it began, and Herbert realises that God knows every minute of his existence, and every minute has its blessing. While Herbert may be over-scrupulous in making an inventory of his unworthiness, God is just as faithfully scrupulous in filling every blessed moment of his life with favour. Finally, having been calmed down, he repeats to himself and says to God, "My God thou art all love…and in this love, more then in bed, I rest."

When it has been a bad day, and we wish we could unsay certain words, and we can't seem to erase from our memory grievances that still rankle with hurt and anger, and we rehearse and replay in the mind all our frantic activity to win approval, to be acknowledged, to be liked and have our self-image projected out there, just admit it. Confess it and face up to your own faults. But for God's sake don't make your failures more important than God's love and Christ's cross. Having had your say, and God having heard every painful word of it, pray, "I will lay me down in peace and take my rest; for it is thou, Lord, only, that makest me dwell in safety…My God thou art all love…and in this love, more then in bed, I rest."    

 

Bittersweet

Ah my dear angry Lord,
Since thou dost love, yet strike;
Cast down, yet help afford;
Sure I will do the like.

I will complain, yet praise;
I will bewail, approve;
And all my sour-sweet days
I will lament, and love.

This poem is short and sweet. It is also short and sharp. The title contains a paradox, a collision of opposites that continues to the last line. Love is never only undisturbed sweetness; love is too essentially human for such colourless perfection. Relationships of love do not grow and deepen unless there is conflict and forgiveness, hurt and healing, routine and excitement, frustration and fulfilment. Love requires the continuing intentional adjustments of self-interest and self giving that enable a relationship to not only survive, but flourish.

Bittersweet was a variety of cider apple in Herbert's day. Taking a bite from an apple is the original bittersweet experience, indeed it was the original sin. Herbert uses the everyday experience of eating fruit to evoke the powerfully evocative story of Eden, and the fall. The first three lines are loud with echoes of Eden, creation, fall, expulsion, and judgement.

"Yet help afford…" As often in these Lenten reflections, we pay attention to Herbert's frequent use of the word that forces a rethink – 'yet'. Sure, God loves yet strikes, because love is not morally neutral, it is the fire at the heart of holiness. But then the word recurs, and 'yet' becomes the sweetener in the bitter narrative of fall, judgement and exile as punishment; "yet help afford", the promise of a Redeemer who would crush the serpent's head.

The angry Lord who loves yet strikes, loves with a holy love. "Love can get angry for good reasons, but is proved in what it does next. Will it work to reconcile and put things right or will it take revenge and withdraw?" That is such a well expressed account of what is going on here. (My Sour-Sweet Days, Oakley, 112)

"I will complain yet praise" carries on the this one sided conversation about contradictions in which Herbert both disagrees and agrees with what God does and who God is. He captures with succinct precision the inner experience of the sinner caught out and forced to say mea culpa, while feeling inside, "since thou dost love yet strike…yet help afford, felix culpa.

This poem about the paradox of Christian existence recalls Luther's strap line that each Christian is 'simil justus et peccator', simultaneously saint and sinner. That's the way life is, and this poem is Herbert's yes to the contradictions of life and of his own inner experience. Every day is a sour sweet day, of guilt and forgiveness, of sin and judgement, of holiness as one step forward, and sin as at least most times, one step back. 

The resolution in the last line is a beautiful moment of acquiescence, and note the absence of the 'yet' word. There is no longer an assumed incongruity, but a settled acceptance that this is how life is for now; he will lament his sin and failure, and love the God he seeks to serve and obey. Once again, by design not accident, Herbert gives Love the last word. It is his yes to the ambivalence and struggle inevitable in a forgiven sinner whose grateful love keeps being undermined by sin's persistence.

This beautiful miniature poem holds the distilled essence of Herbert's spirituality. There is realism about the holy love of God that must judge and not indulge sin; and an equal conviction that such love precisely because of its holiness, will help afford and seek to redeem, forgive, reconcile and restore. For now, Christian existence is lived in the discomfort of inner contradiction, because the Christian has dual citizenship of earth and heaven and these have conflicting loyalties, temptations and goals. So every day is a sour sweet day, in which faithfulness will never reach perfection, but will persist and persevere on the road to holiness, lamenting every sin and loving God whose help has been afforded: O wretched man that I am! Who shall deliver me from this body of death? Thanks be to God – through Jesus Christ our Lord." (Romans 7.24-25)    

 

Love III

Love bade me welcome, yet my soul drew back,

        Guilty of dust and sin.

But quick-ey'd Love, observing me grow slack

        From my first entrance in,

Drew nearer to me, sweetly questioning

        If I lack'd anything.

 

"A guest," I answer'd, "worthy to be here";

        Love said, "You shall be he."

"I, the unkind, the ungrateful? ah my dear,

        I cannot look on thee."

Love took my hand and smiling did reply,

        "Who made the eyes but I?"

 

"Truth, Lord, but I have marr'd them; let my shame

        Go where it doth deserve."

"And know you not," says Love, "who bore the blame?"

        "My dear, then I will serve."

"You must sit down," says Love, "and taste my meat."

        So I did sit and eat.

 

Today's Herbert post is not as in previous posts, literary analysis in aid of theological reflection. It's a piece of spiritual autobiography. 

Late in my final year at College, having previously completed my MA majoring in Moral Philosophy, I picked up a Victorian leather bound pocket volume of Herbert's poems. It cost me fifty pence at the recently established Voltaire and Rousseau's secondhand book shop in Otago Lane.

I doubt you could persuade me to sell it for a hundred times that now. The reason has nothing to do with economics, and everything to do with personal history, and the importance of remembered joy in the weaving of our own spiritual growth and formation.  

My first remembered encounter with George Herbert's poetry was when I read Love III for the first time. "Love bade me welcome, yet my soul drew back…" As I read that line, and moved on through the poem, I was pulled into a spiritual experience. This was not so much a literary encounter as hearing and heeding a voice which mapped my longings more accurately than any marketing algorithm.

At the age of 15 I had been expelled from school before the O level exam diet. The hoped for trajectory for an able pupil took a radical downturn and I found myself driving a tractor on Clydeside market gardens, labouring in a brickwork, and started an engineering apprenticeship. And in the midst of all this I was converted and gave my life to Christ, and all my priorities were reinvented and reconfigured.

Within a year I felt an insistent inward call to be a minister, a preacher of the gospel that had turned my life round, a pastor like the one who had believed in me and encouraged me to rebuild my life. That required attendance at night school, then day release and Langside College in Glasgow, which atypical two year educational road map produced enough qualifications to go to Glasgow University. 

I had loved, and excelled at English in school. But in my degree I chose philosophy (that's another story), and so missed the chance to study English at degree level. So a quite intense young Lanarkshire evangelical, nearing the end of a seven year educational process from start to finish, and about to be ordained a Baptist minister, came across arguably the finest poem in the rich tradition of Anglican spirituality.

Love III opened windows on to a different theological landscape. This poem, and several other key texts in my life, (yet another story for another time) has helped to shape me, particularly my mindset, as someone who is instinctively ecumenical, intellectually curious and open to newness, seeking to be hospitable to the ideas and experiences and perspectives of others, requiring what I believe is one of the harder fruits of the Spirit to nurture and cultivate, theological humility. I've a ways to go on that one. 

It's quite a hard ask to identify the clues and nudges within the poem, that give Love III its continuing significance for me, as a touchstone of what I think Christian existence feels like from the inside. I only offer them as the conclusions of someone in whom this poem has lived and been life-giving for over 45 years. 

The personification of Love, as the proper name of Christ

the dialogue form in which host and guest try not to offend each other

the repeatedly patient voice of Love, contradicting the unworthiness, lack of self-esteem and lack of trust in Love itself

the profound lessons in hospitality as Love bids welcome, observes the guest's need, taking the hand and smiling

the insistence which isn't an attempt to overpower, but to persuade

and throughout the poem, an argument only Love was ever going to win

And, as so often in Herbert, the power of the last line, in which Christ has the last word. Except Christ's last word is in the penultimate line; it is the guest who has the last word, and it is acknowledgement of defeat in argument, the acquiescence of the heart, the acceptance of Love's invitation, the relieved capitulation of heart to heart, and thus a shared Eucharist of guest and host. 

(Picture is an early postcard of my undergraduate Alma Mater, University of Glasgow)  

 

 

 

The H Scriptures II

OH that I knew how all thy lights combine,
And the configurations of their glorie!
Seeing not onely how each verse doth shine,
But all the constellations of the storie.

This verse marks that, and both do make a motion
Unto a third, that ten leaves off doth lie:
Then as dispersed herbs do watch a potion,
These three make up some Christians destinie:

Such are thy secrets, which my life makes good,
And comments on thee: for in ev’ry thing
Thy words do finde me out, & parallels bring,
And in another make me understood.

Starres are poore books, & oftentimes do misse:
This book of starres lights to eternall blisse.

It is easy to miss the sophisticated hermeneutics outlined in this simple sonnet. Narrative criticism, canonical criticism, inter-textuality and intra-textuality, and theological interpretation, are not fresh discoveries of post-modern hermeneutics. Herbert describes with familiarity and ease how the Scriptures require us to pay attention to story, to interpret scripture with scripture, to interrogate each text in order to learn its meaning, application and command. 

The first stanza compares the serious bible reader to an astronomer, studying configurations, familiar with patterns of light, knowing how each relates to each through the seasons. The Scriptures tell a coherent story, and display an inner harmony, a discernible movement of inter-relatedness. They contain a universe of lights.

The second stanza reflects the standard hermeneutics of Reformation exegesis; the study of the original text and meaning, and the search for its application to Christian life today; ancient text translated and interpreted into modern context. 

"Such are thy secrets", and they are only found as treasure in the field by those prepared to plough, and stop when they hear the clunk of the blade on whatever lies hidden. Through Scripture we come to know who God is; theological exegesis for Herbert was seeking to know God through scripture, that first. But the dynamic process of reading scripture results in the reader being read. As we search the scriptures, we are searched. As we seek God we find that God is already seeking us. "Thy words do find me out", describes those moments of illumination when we discover more clearly, and not always flatteringly, who we are, and who God is. 

Scripture reading is a disciplined process of making ourselves understood, to ourselves, or rather, God making us understood to ourselves.  "Search me, O God, and know my heart: try me, and know my thoughts: And see if there be any wicked way in me, and lead me in the way everlasting. (Psalm 139.23-4) The act and art of reading scripture is fulfilled as we know God more intimately, and as we understand more fully how fully we are understood. 

The final two lines contrast responsible reading of scripture with astrology. Starres are poor books, astrology is hit or miss and wide open to charlatans, wishful thinking, and worse for Herbert, assume that life is governed by forces other than the purposive love and faithfulness of the Creator. 

"This booke of starres lights to eternall blisse", is a lovely image of a night sky, populated with light, infinite in variety and inexhaustible in knowledge to be discerned, discovered and diffused.

A few years ago I was involved in an act of Bible restoration. The Bible belonged to one of the finest exponents of bible reading I know, whose long life of reading "the constellations of the storie" had been transposed into the key of Christian character and devotion to God. I took it to the University bookbinder for repair when she went into care, and he painstakingly retained as much of the original as he could. I was able to return it as a restored treasure, 'a booke of starres.' Herbert would have understood the treasure of a worn out Bible, and the joy of its restoration.